[Cohost Archive] My History With The Homestar Runner Fanstuff Wiki and Wiki User Wiki.

Original post by @KirbychuHRD

(seeing these logos again is going to give someone a panic attack I’m sure)

I think pretty much everyone who’s grown up in the internet age can say that at some point in their lives they found themselves wound up into some kind of web community dedicated to their preferred fandom of choice, either having lengthy discussions about their favorite things and what the series means to them, or spending time writing their own stories and sharing them with others. Whether you were an early millennial running a Dragon Ball Z fan page on Geocities or a Gen Z teen spending their afternoon posting Steven Universe fanfics to AO3, I think everyone who’s grown up in the last 30 years could probably say they know what I’m talking about here. Of course I’m no different, I wouldn’t be talking about this now if I thought I was, but I do think my creative outlet at the time may have been different from what most might expect. As you may have gathered from the title, my original community of choice was the Homestar Runner Fanstuff Wiki, or HRFWiki for short.

For some background, the HRFWiki was a subset of the greater Homestar Runner Wiki, which to this day is still the most worryingly comprehensive resource on the Homestar Runner body of work, with thousands of pages of detailed information covering every toon, game, character and minor recurring piece of background scenery featured in anything ever produced by the Brothers Chaps. As such, the Homestar Runner Fanstufff Wiki utilized the same MediaWiki style formatting as its parent site, but was instead dedicated to hosting all manner of Homestar Runner-related fan creations. At the wiki’s peak you could find everything from fanfics, OCs, and works of interactive fiction, to projects as advanced as fan-produced flash animations and games in the same style as those from the official Homestar Runner website.

As for why I got so absorbed into this community in particular, I couldn’t really say. While I was definitely a big fan of Homestar Runner growing up (and continue to be to this day), it’s always just been one interest of mine out of many. While I did occasionally browse Pokemon fansites and may have attempted to write a Kirby-based sprite comic at one point, the HRFWiki was the only fan community I ever seriously stuck with. My best guess is that it originally resonated with me just due to the incredibly whacky nature of the Homestar Runner series itself. There were so many characters with such distinct designs and personalities, and so many different topics and genres covered within the toons themselves, that as a kid it really felt like you could plop pretty much anything into this insane world and it would fit in. Additionally, my good friend @Ratheronfire is the one who originally introduced me to the Wiki itself after he showed me some of his own fanfics alongside his OC X On Fire, so his influence was definitely part of it as well. Then of course once I did get integrated into the community it was the fellow wiki members I interacted with that made me want to stay.

While I was never the best writer or artist I still had a lot of fun in the few years I spent on the HRFWiki. I would occasionally participate in community projects, creating mediocre sprites, and for a time I even attempted to write my own Strong Bad-style email show. The username I use across the internet to this day, Kirbychu HR’D, even originated as my very creative and original Homestar Runner OC (and yes even at the time I knew a Kirby/Pikachu hybrid was not a particularly amazing idea for an OC in a series not related to Kirby or Pokemon, as that was the main reason why I added “HR’D” to the end of my name, to imply that this unholy amalgamation was somehow “Homestar Runner’d”). My biggest and arguably most popular contributions to the wiki came in the form of two separate interactive role play pages, Homestar’s Resort and the Free Country USA Range. Homestar’s Resort, or Club Homestar as it was originally known, was meant to be a vacation resort owned and operated by Homestar Runner himself, while Free Country USA Range was a hiking trail and nature park. Both of these were basically just themed hangout pages, where the members of the wiki could roleplay as their OCs and goof around with each other, with the actual Homestar Runner cast occasionally making an appearance in attempt to justify keeping the pages on the site. Between working on these projects myself and reading the works created by other Wiki members, I really did have a lot of fun during my time on the HRFWiki, and made a good number of friends at the same time.

Of course, as fun as it was at the time, sadly all good things come to an end eventually. For the HRFWiki, this ending unfortunately came rather abruptly in the form of the “Great Fanstuff Purge of 2008”. You see, while the greater userbase was happy to carry on making their dumb Homestar Runner fanfics and OCs, the site’s moderators were growing increasingly displeased with both the quantity and quality of what was being posted. Eventually the mods decided that there would be a purge, and only a select handful of the Wiki’s “best” content would be carried over. The intention was to clear up some server space while also cleaning up anything low effort, unfinished or left abandoned by inactive accounts, but the majority of the wiki’s userbase only saw it as destroying several years’ worth of their hard work. Further discontent arose when the “Glorious Gravy Boat”, or the pages that were selected for preservation, were actually named, with many users complaining about both the limited selection and a perceived bias for certain users over others. In spite of the backlash the moderators eventually went through with the purge, which also ended up being the final nail in the coffin for the HRFWiki when it ended up taking over a month for the site to be relaunched. While the wiki did reopen for new submissions for a time, the majority of the userbase never returned and the Homestar Runner Fanstuff Wiki shut down for good less than a year later.

While the HRFWiki itself was gone, a number of the site’s users evidently enjoyed the style of creative writing as well as the community that had grown up around it. Also by this point some wiki users were tired of needing to incorporate Homestar Runner-related content as well. Eventually these disenfranchised HRFWiki users came together to found a new Wiki: The Wiki User Wiki (or WUW). I was one of the first to jump over to the new Wiki, not wanting to stop writing my silly stories and still wishing to stay close to the various friends I had made over the years. While all of my contributions to the original wiki were gone, I was able to either migrate or replicate my favorite creations to the WUW. Kirbychu’s emails continued without the addition of Homestar characters, Homestar’s Resort was expanded into Kirbychu’s Summer Resort, and Free Country USA Range briefly came back as the Wiki User Mountain Range. By this point, though, I was getting tired of running these projects by myself, and was more interested in developing content alongside my friends. My fondest memories from my time on the WUW come from one of our largest collaboration projects, a parody sci-fi series loosely based on franchises like Doctor Who and Star Wars named Space-Aged Stupidity.

I continued writing and messing around with my wiki friends for another few years, into the early 2010s, but by this point I think everyone was finally starting to get burnt out. Everyone on the site was getting older and starting to commit more to school or jobs, and given we were already a very niche subset of an already niche fan community the WUW as a whole wasn’t exactly attracting new members in any meaningful amount. The number of daily visits to the site gradually dropped, and the frequency of edits and updates to projects went down with them. Every now and then one of us would get a burst of inspiration and release some new project or propose a collab with another user, and even now I still remember some of my final ideas. Ratheronfire and I wanted to do a series exploring the backstory of his original OC X On Fire, another friend I only ever knew by the name of “Badstar” and I briefly conceived of an absurd sitcom-style project starring our respective OCs living together as roommates, and I also pitched the idea of a more serious horror sequel to Space Aged Stupidity named “Space-Aged Catastrophe”. All these ideas and more came and went, but very little usually ever came of them. Unlike the HRFWiki the WUW never properly shut down, but these days it’s unlikely to see more than one or two edits a year, if anyone ever thinks to post anything at all. All the users also tried to keep in touch as friends even off of the wiki, either through Skype chatrooms, Steam groups or similar. While I’m sure several remain friends to this day, sadly I eventually lost touch with the majority of them.

I still look back fondly at my time on the HRFWiki and WUW, as cringe-worthy as a lot of my actual projects from that time were they still made up a formative part of my childhood and teenage years. I like to think that a lot of my recent creative endeavors may never have happened if not for the silly fanfics and roleplays I made those 10-15 years ago (and given Ratheronfire recently completed a full enhanced remake of Stinkoman 20X6 almost single-handedly I would imagine he probably feels the same). I also still think about those friends I made back then and hope they’re all doing well.

(Hey, Lucas Aura/Lucian Summers, Sephiroth/Lex, Ert+/Dan the Man, Im A Bell/Bellstrom, Cowpuncher, Chaos, Badstar and anyone else whose decade-old usernames I’m forgetting, if you guys are still out there and ever see this feel free to hit me up!)

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